For the past 10 days my cellular phone had been curiously silent. The usual beep-beep sound that would announce the arrival of yet another text message wasnowhere to be heard. Instead, I could only stare at the blinking green light at the top of my Ericsson phone, and watch the battery run progressively out of power over the course of a few days.
Yesterday morning my phone suddenly came to life again, and I received two text messages from Manila! My friend Noel, who texts me most often, had sent me two messages. I was elated as, having gotten used to living with daily texting back and forth to friends in Manila, I was depressed when the service failed. It was like returning to the pre-historic age of having no electricity or television.
If I was depressed at receiving no replies to my text messages, Noel was even more upset. A student at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Noel was spending much of the little extra cash he had texting me, only to find out that I wasn’t receiving them. Frustrated, he called up a Globe operator in the Philippines. Now, although Globe is one of the biggest mobile phone service providers in the Philippines, it is also known to have expanded too quickly, resulting in a service that is often described as crappy and patchy. Missed calls, calls that never get through, and lost text messages are some of the major complaints of Philippine mobile phone users. The operator told Noel that perhaps it was my service provider who was to blame for the missed messages. When I continued to never receive his messages, Noel called a Globe operator again and this time screamed in frustration at the person on the other end of the line. This time Globe admitted that they were “upgrading” their system and that this may have affected his texting.
As we waited for Globe to get its act together, news came this past weekend and on Monday that communist New People’s Army rebels had attacked telecommunication relay towers of four phone operators in provinces north and northwest of Manila. Several towers owned by Smart, Globe, PLDT, and Piltel were targeted by these rebels, who attempted to burn them down. Officials say the rebels were trying to punish the companies for refusing to pay protection money. Most companies claimed minimal disruption to their phone networks, claiming that most calls were rerouted and that since the attacks took place at night, when call volumes were low, the disruption was limited.
Sending an average 100 million text messages a day, Filipinos are undoubtedly the most avid texters in the world. The same cannot be said of Saudis and other nationalities. Indeed, the only people who text me regularly are my Pinoy friends both in Saudi Arabia and in the Philippines. My Saudi friends act as if texting was only for demented and desperate people, while an English friend in Jeddah insists on sending me only monosyllabic text messages. Most frustrating!
Texting provides the immediacy of nearly instant communication without the huge cost that a long distance phone call hits you with. I still rely on texting as a vital link to friends and loved ones in the Philippines and elsewhere. I don’t know what I would do without it. E-mail? No, too slow. Call? No, too expensive. I really don’t know how I used to live without it just a year ago!
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Did Mary Jane Vitos have her husband killed?
THE GHASTLY NEWS spread like wildfire in the Gulf. A Filipino woman and three accomplices had “confessed” 10 days ago to have allegedly planned and executed the murder of her Canadian husband in Kuwait in order to collect his $80,000 in life insurance.
If this is true, then it is a plan that went horribly wrong. On the evening of Oct. 10, Mary Jane Vitos, 26, and her Canadian husband Luc Ethier, 36, were out on an evening stroll in a shopping area south of Kuwait City. Suddenly a car pulled up and what would later be described as an Indian-looking man jumped out and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is the greatest!) as he sprayed the couple with gunfire. In the hail of bullets, Ethier died on the spot, but Vitos survived although she was severely wounded, having been shot three times: Twice in the back and once in her shoulder.
Foreign news agencies were quick to pounce on the story, assuming that it was a case of Islamic backlash against the American bombing campaign of Afghanistan. Kuwaiti officials were quick to urge the media not to jump to conclusions, but the murder nevertheless sent shock waves throughout the Western community in the Gulf, who were already jittery.
The Filipino community in the Gulf was equally shocked, hoping to high heavens that Vitos had not planned the attack. But as the investigation went on, it became increasingly clear that a Kuwaiti suspect, who had been arrested and interrogated, had nothing to do with the murder and was later released. Many people were wondering: Could Vitos have been so desperate to get her hands on the life insurance money that she would allow herself to be nearly killed just to make it seem like her husband had been killed by an extremist?
As the probe continued, several Filipino suspects were arrested and questioned. Finally, around 10 days ago the Kuwaiti government announced that all three suspects and Vitos had confessed to have plotted the attack and murder of Ethier. Immediately, Migrante, the Philippine non-governmental organization that fights for the rights of Pinoy migrant workers, fired off a press release saying it believed the four may have been tortured into giving the confessions based on unspecified reports. The press release was short on facts and long in rhetoric.
Worryingly, Kuwaiti authorities had initially denied the Philippine ambassador access to the accused, but this week the Philippine government announced it was sending a legal team to provide assistance to the four accused.
Hopefully, Vitos and the other three Filipinos will be given a fair trial in which the truth of what really happened that fateful Oct. 10th evening will emerge. Some Filipinos who marry Westerners unfortunately have the reputation of being gold-diggers. We all pray that Vitos wasn’t one of them.
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The collapse of the Taleban
NO ONE REALLY expected the Taleban in Afghanistan to collapse as quickly as they did this past week. Mazar-e-Sharif fell first to the Northern Alliance troops, after five weeks of sustained US bombing. Analysts were quick to predict that it would take months to capture Kabul, the capital. How wrong they were! Within days Kabul was liberated and Kandahar, the Taleban stronghold, was also being taken over by Northern Alliance troops.
Taleban supporters tried to put a positive spin on the obvious defeat of Mulla Muhammad Omar’s black turbaned troops, by saying that it was a tactical retreat to the hills where they would regroup and launch counter-attacks in the future. But hardly anyone was buying that line, with a Taleban commander interviewed by Sky Television admitting they had abandoned Kabul because they feared the large number of civilian casualties if the Americans heavily bombed the capital.
How quickly circumstances change! Just 10 days ago, everyone was bemoaning the seemingly “ineffectual” US bombing of Afghanistan, claiming the US had nothing to show for it. But when the cards collapsed, they sure collapsed fast.
Perhaps the most irksome people in all of this have been the bleeding-heart Western liberals who have rallied to protest against the war in Afghanistan, adopting knee-jerk “politically correct” positions that are often wildly at odds with what is genuinely good for the Afghan people.
The Taleban were brutish thugs who denied women all rights, forcing them to stay at home, deprived of education and work. Is this really Islamic? The liberated Afghan population celebrated this week by shaving off their beards, dancing in the streets to music that had previously been banned, and some women showed their faces in public for the first time in five years.
For sure, the Northern Alliance has had its share of bad behavior in the past, but I think at this point anything is better than the Taleban.
Now the American-led Alliance has the hard task of putting together a coalition government that represents all Afghans, and must hunt down Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda operatives.
